Chuc mung nam moi!
Happy Têt! Happy Vietnamese New Year!
According to the lunar calendar, 2010 will be tiger year, starting on February 14!
Bonne année du Têt! Heureux nouvel an vietnamien!
D’après le calendrier lunaire, l’année 2010 sera celle du tigre et commence ce 14 février 2010!
Happy tiger year!
Dalat was a welcome escape from Saigon. Cool and quiet, it’s no surprise that this relatively small town is a big draw for tourists, both foreign and Vietnamese. It’s known for its flowers and berries (SO good), its aura of love, and some fairly bizarre and cheesy attractions…
Let’s start with the flowers. Dalat has a flower festival annually on the solar new year which is a big draw, but the rest of the year they feature all kinds of beautiful flowers in the Dalat Flower Garden. Maybe I’m preparing for the day when I’m a grandma, but I quite enjoyed this. They grow everything from Birds of Paradise to orchids to snapdragons. The cheesiness came in with the entertaining topiary (they actually add cutout teeth and eyes to the animals) and statues of hill-tribe people. Jen and I took full advantage, of course.
Then there’s the Crazy House. It was designed by a Vietnamese woman with a PhD in Architecture who wanted to encourage people to reconnect with nature. The house itself is hard to describe – there are ladders and tunnels and walkways which seem to go nowhere. For a price you can stay in one of the rooms, but rest assured that waking up in a bizarre place like this would make you feel like you’re Alice and you’ve followed the rabbit down the rabbit hole. Highlights included evil-looking kangaroos, mirrors over every bed and an entryway that looked like a vulva.
Last stop was the Valley of Love. Jen and I took a romantic motorbike ride north to check this one out, and it did not disappoint. Love-themed statues and photo ops were everywhere. The icing on the cake was when we rented out a swan paddle boat for a jaunt around the lake. I was so inspired that I almost proposed.
In addition to all those very romantic sights, Dalat also boasts some mediocre waterfalls where Vietnamese men dress up as cowboys (??) and charge you to take their photo with their horse. All this makes for a pretty entertaining couple of days, and a welcome relief from the big city.
The teachers at my school seem to think that the purpose of Arts & Crafts class is to make kids mass produce enough decorations to cover the walls of our classrooms thrice over. They pass out two or sometimes three copies of the same coloring page to each student and prod them along until each one is fully decorated. I’ve never heard kids put up such a fuss about coloring; they’d rather continue doing math work than be sent off to Arts & Crafts.
The other day, one of the teachers came into my classroom and handed me a stack of papers, each bearing the outlines of four flowers. She explained that we needed more decorations for the third floor, and even though the kids had colored at least 8 of these flowers each already, we needed another 8 from each of them. I gave her a funny look and told her that I’d do my best but I couldn’t promise I’d get a page from each kid, much less two.
Our school suffers from a serious flower deficiency
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